Dell EMC today took the wraps off its new SCv3000 Series arrays, offering midrange storage customers high-end storage automation and virtualization technologies that were first pioneered by Compellent. (Dell acquired Compellent in 2011.)

The technology giant is "democratizing storage," Bob Fine, director of Product Marketing at Dell EMC told Enterprise Storage Forum. "We're bringing the features that were in the upper echelon of the storage [market] to under $10,000."

Replacing the SCv2000 Series, the new line of midrange storage systems represents much "more than a small processor upgrade," assured Fine. Certainly, the SCv3000 arrays now offer a six-core processor and 32GB of memory, compared to the 4-core chip and 16GB of memory contained in its predecessor. The newer array can also accommodate more drives and boasts a larger storage capacity (222 drives and 1PB of storage) than the outgoing model (168 drives and 672TB of storage), with the added benefit of three times higher bandwidth.

Taken altogether, the SCv3000 provides a 50 percent improvement in overall storage performance compared to the previous model. In tests, the array achieved a 270,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) rating.

Beyond the hardware upgrades, which now includes a new modular storage interface that supports Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI and SAS replacing the integrated setup used in the previous model, the SCv3000 offers businesses a lower-cost entry point to higher-end storage efficiency features that have helped larger enterprises make the most out of their storage investments and better manage their data.

"We didn't offer compression [in the SCv2000 series]. Now, we do," said Fine. According to company estimates, the SCv3000's intelligent compression technology can yield data reduction rates of up to 93 percent.

Another example is a full data replication capability that supports all SC Series arrays (SCv3000, SC5000, SC7000 and SC9000 Series) whereas an SCv2000 array can only replicate to across a single tier.

Also borrowing from its upmarket cousins, the SCv3000 systems includes disaster recovery, storage federation and automated tiering. The arrays also support hybrid and all-flash configurations, enabling businesses to achieve "all-flash performance at lower cost" using a mix of solid-state drives, traditional spinning disks and the system's included storage optimization capabilities, said Fine.

Dell EMC SCv3000 Series storage arrays are set to ship in early October.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Enterprise Storage Forum. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.